It’s Great for Parents (and Kids Too)

If you’re a parent, it’s extremely unlikely you’re going to be willing to store your credit card info in Fortnite or Roblox on your kid’s iPad, which means that you’ll be forced to punch that in each time your child wants to make an online in-game purchase.

By contrast, Apple’s system allows your kids to have their own App Store account that’s under your parental control as part of Apple’s Family Sharing features. Kids who want to purchase anything — or even download a free app — are required to “Ask to Buy” and have that transaction approved by a parent, either by entering their password into the kid’s device, or simply by approving the request from their own iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

It’s a great system, and it works really well. Plus, it not only benefits parents, who are able to more effectively keep tabs on their kids’ spending, but it also benefits the kids themselves, and by extension, the game developers. After all, it’s much easier to tap a button and approve a request that comes in on your iPhone than it is to type in credit card information directly into a game app each time, and it’s also easier for a kid to tap the “Ask to Buy” button than it is to go find mom or dad and hand over their iPad whenever they want something. This means that kids are able to spend more money on in-app purchases, which is actually a huge win for developers too.

Of course, developers could choose to offer their own parental control systems in their own apps, but the problem here would be a lack of consistency. Parents would be left figuring out how to navigate different parental control systems for each game that their kids like to play, and of course they’d have to trust those parental control systems to actually work properly, and trust them enough to store their credit card info with the developer.